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There is hardly a laborer attached to an English
country house who has not taken a litter of kittens or puppies to the
bucket, and drowned all of them except the one he thinks the most
promising. Such a man has nothing to learn about the survival of the
fittest except that it acts in more ways than he has yet noticed; for he
knows quite well, as you will find if you are not too proud to talk to
him, that this sort of selection occurs naturally (in Darwin's sense)
too: that, for instance, a hard winter will kill off a weakly child as
the bucket kills off a weakly puppy. Then there is the farm laborer.
Shakespear's Touchstone, a court-bred fool, was shocked to find in the
shepherd a natural philosopher, and opined that he would be damned for
the part he took in the sexual selection of sheep. As to the production
of new species by the selection of variations, that is no news to your
gardener. Now if you are familiar with these three processes: the
survival of the fittest, sexual selection, and variation leading to new
kinds, there is nothing to puzzle you in Darwinism.


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